Intelligent Design, Creationism and Deism

mindlight

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It comes down to results.

Critic of science to scientist: "Why do you persist in your methodological naturalism?"
Scientist: "It works."

Critic of science: "Why don't you use my mystical insights in your work?"

Scientist: "They don't work."

If supernatural assumptions worked, scientists would use them no matter who objected. But they don't work. And that's all that matters.

You do not have to assume supernatural assumptions to know that materialistic reductionism does not really explain anything for sure, hence the reference to Nagel earlier. I have no reason to trust your guesswork over anyone else really when it comes to the big speculative models.

Sorry, that's wrong. For a lot of reasons. First, "proof" is not part of science. It merely gathers evidence to the point that denial is foolish.

Scientists accept the Big Bang because it explains what we see, and numerous predictions of the theory have been repeatedly verified. Macroevolution has been directly observed. Even many creationists now admit the fact of new species, genera, and sometimes families. And since God Himself says that the earth brought forth living things, it seems odd for a proclaimed Christian do deny abiogenesis. Do you trust God's account of creation or do you think creationism has adequate evidence to overthrow that?

You define science as something that cannot necessarily be proven by the scientific method without really understanding how ludicrous that sounds. Macroevolution has not been directly observed and especially since we have not been observing it over the millions of years required to verify its results. Microevolution has been observed and then conclusions generalized. Uniformitarianism is another assumption here that is unverifiable by the scientific method.

The definition of species is quite crucial to the admission of new ones. There were not 23 species of sparrows on the ark but they are all sparrows.

It was God who brought forth living things from the earth, not the earth that birthed them. In the same way, he could turn stones into the sons of Abraham should he so choose (Mt 3:9). There is a difference. Abiogenesis is suggesting that physics and chemistry can birth biological life, which is demonstrably unproven and false. But I see your link between Deism and naturalism there since God is not involved in your theory of the development of life but rather sets up the scene in which life could begin in the distant first place.

I trust God's account of creation quite literally but do not consider anyone to have enough evidence to prove or disprove it. The scientific method just does not work for origins.
 
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J_B_

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By your definition the property of space to be distorted by mass, is measured in a unit that is part of the SI system.

I assume you understand necessary and sufficient conditions? It is necessary that we can measure a property, but that alone is not sufficient to define something as a property. It must meet ALL the conditions of the definition. Regardless, I'm not going to keep harping on this. If you can't figure out how to meet the conditions of a definition you provided, there's no point.

I was hoping this would provide some common ground to bring us back to the question I asked in post #34, and what I also rephrased in post #57: Does time cause anything?
 
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The Barbarian

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I assume you understand necessary and sufficient conditions? It is necessary that we can measure a property, but that alone is not sufficient to define something as a property. It must meet ALL the conditions of the definition. Regardless, I'm not going to keep harping on this. If you can't figure out how to meet the conditions of a definition you provided, there's no point.

I was hoping this would provide some common ground to bring us back to the question I asked in post #34, and what I also rephrased in post #57: Does time cause anything?

Of course it does. It keeps everything from happening all at once.
 
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J_B_

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Of course it does. It keeps everything from happening all at once.

Do you have a citation for that? What I would be looking for is either an experiment where time objects were not present and everything happened all at once, or a mathematical model showing the same.
 
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J_B_

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Forgot my Warning For The Humor-Impaired. Sorry.

My humor is very sarcastic, which constantly angered people on CF. As a result, I know longer employ any humor in my posts. Just straight up.

I would prefer the same from you - a straight answer. Were you serious that time causes something? Or does it not?
 
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J_B_

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Does a rock cause anything?

Yes. A rock is a material object with a mass property. Mass results in a gravitational relationship with other objects that have mass. Tiny as it may be, rocks exert a gravitational pull.
 
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The Barbarian

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Yes. A rock is a material object with a mass property. Mass results in a gravitational relationship with other objects that have mass. Tiny as it may be, rocks exert a gravitational pull.

Kind of the way time causes breakdown of radioactive material. It proceeds not by necessity, depending on time. If the rock is moving very fast, time slows down and thereby slows the radioactive decay.
 
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The Barbarian

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My humor is very sarcastic, which constantly angered people on CF. As a result, I know longer employ any humor in my posts. Just straight up.

I would prefer the same from you - a straight answer. Were you serious that time causes something? Or does it not?

See above. I like sarcastic humor. Better sarcasm than no humor at all.
 
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J_B_

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Kind of the way time causes breakdown of radioactive material. It proceeds not by necessity, depending on time. If the rock is moving very fast, time slows down and thereby slows the radioactive decay.

I take this as a yes answer to my question. Then you disagree with the Chappell paper from post #52, where time is reduced to a mathematical property of 3D space. In that model, space would be the cause due to the time property, not a time object. Where did they go wrong?

My position is that it's not necessary to invoke time at all, so Chappell is only step #1 for me. Their approach would need to be combined with Oleinik's paper (which I assume you would also disagree with) where time is presented as a result of material processes. In simple terms, it would mean that instead of plotting the position of a particle versus time, you would plot the position of the particle versus the number of oscillations of caesium.
 
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The Barbarian

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Then you disagree with the Chappell paper from post #52, where time is reduced to a mathematical property of 3D space.

The main issue that motivated John, and resulted in the creation of the dissident science movement, was his very fervent belief that Einstein’s relativity theory was wrong.
...
John worked hard to establish the realization that Einstein’s relativity theories were false. He traveled to science meetings and corresponded with other “anti-Einsteinians”. One reason for this personal approach “for keeping in touch is that it helps overcome the inevitable disillusion”. At some point, John hit upon the idea of publishing a book of articles written by anti-Einsteinians, but that didn’t pan out. Another idea was establishing a scientific conference to promote anti-Einstein views, and that didn’t pan out until many years later. Meanwhile John continued to publish papers in the journal SST. But they had no impact and so John continued his search for like minded scientists and fellow anti-Einsteinians and his project to establish an anti-Einstein scientific conference.
John E. Chappell Jr. Creator Of the Dissident Science Revolution


He apparently also claims that the "luminiferous aether" was found, which is inconsistent with numerous data from a number of attempts to locate it, including the Michaelson-Morely experiment. And that brings up an even larger problem, since the aether is incompatible with the photoelectric effect.
 
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J_B_

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The main issue that motivated John, and resulted in the creation of the dissident science movement, was his very fervent belief that Einstein’s relativity theory was wrong.
...
John worked hard to establish the realization that Einstein’s relativity theories were false. He traveled to science meetings and corresponded with other “anti-Einsteinians”. One reason for this personal approach “for keeping in touch is that it helps overcome the inevitable disillusion”. At some point, John hit upon the idea of publishing a book of articles written by anti-Einsteinians, but that didn’t pan out. Another idea was establishing a scientific conference to promote anti-Einstein views, and that didn’t pan out until many years later. Meanwhile John continued to publish papers in the journal SST. But they had no impact and so John continued his search for like minded scientists and fellow anti-Einsteinians and his project to establish an anti-Einstein scientific conference.
John E. Chappell Jr. Creator Of the Dissident Science Revolution


He apparently also claims that the "luminiferous aether" was found, which is inconsistent with numerous data from a number of attempts to locate it, including the Michaelson-Morely experiment. And that brings up an even larger problem, since the aether is incompatible with the photoelectric effect.

So? The paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal. Did they make a mistake? Are you judging the paper based on its content or based on opinions of his that you don't like? Tell me what's wrong with the content and I'll listen.

Further, this is not the only reference that discusses the idea. There is also something more recent (Why Time Is Encoded in the Geometry of Space), which notes the fact that this idea has been around since at least 1962 (Three-Dimensional Geometry as Carrier of Information about Time).
 
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The Barbarian

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I'm under the impression that every successful mutation is evolution. The word "species" is just a categorical term for us people to use to classify animals into types for communication purposes.

Every new mutation is evolution. Really, every birth and death in a population is evolution, as the allele frequencies change thereby. Evolution is not merely improvement. It can be neutral, or for a time, even harmful.
 
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The Barbarian

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Regardless, all I meant to ask was how you were coming to the conclusion these people are deists.

The forward to Michael Denton's Nature's Destiny certainly qualifies as a form of deism.
 
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returnn23

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Intelligent Design is a reasonable observation about life and nature. The complex machinery of a single living cell includes the ability to reproduce. Where did the instructions that govern its functions come from? Were they created by accident? Through random events?

Bacteria, when exposed to a harmful substance, can swap genetic material between each other using Horizontal Gene Transfer. So they use this existing material in an attempt to survive. This is a built-in ability. In the end, bacteria always remain bacteria.

Theistic Evolution does not define where and how God acted. The basic idea is that he started everything and then put a wind-up toy on the floor to go wherever it wanted. This is not what the Bible tells us.

Colossians 1:17

"And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
 
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The Barbarian

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Intelligent Design is a reasonable observation about life and nature. The complex machinery of a single living cell includes the ability to reproduce. Where did the instructions that govern its functions come from? Were they created by accident? Through random events?

Darwin's great discovery was that it wasn't random. And this is where "Intelligent Design" approaches rationality. The IDers who argue that the universe and physical constants were "front loaded" so as to produce a world where life would appear, have something right, IMO.

It's like shaking up a jar filled with water and particules of different sizes. The particles settle out in a very specific order, even though the motions and interactions are random. Evolution works like that. Random events, but ordered processes. And that was what Darwin figured out.

Bacteria, when exposed to a harmful substance, can swap genetic material between each other using Horizontal Gene Transfer.

The evolution of pili made this possible. It was a big step for prokaryotes. A form of sexual recombination in a creature lacking even a nucleus. Not all of them can do it, of course. Horizontal gene transfer also happens in eukaryotes, but not as frequently or as easily. One way is endosymbiosis, in which two organisms exist together, and eventually can't survive apart. Such a process has been directly observed, BTW.

In the end, bacteria always remain bacteria.

Sort of the way humans always remain apes, or vertebrates always remain vertebrates, etc.

Theistic Evolution does not define where and how God acted.

That's the thing. I think most of them are like the more thoughtful IDers, who suppose God (or whoever the IDers think the "designer" is) merely set the rules to bring forth life from the earth.

t is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science—that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes. This is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called “special creationist school.” According to special creationism, living organisms are not natural forms, whose origin and design were built into the laws of nature from the beginning, but rather contingent forms analogous in essence to human artifacts, the result of a series of supernatural acts, involving God’s direct intervention in the course of nature, each of which involved the suspension of natural law. Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world– that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or galaxies.

In large measure, therefore, the teleological argument presented here and the special creationist worldview are mutually exclusive accounts of the world. In the last analysis, evidence for one is evidence against the other. Put simply, the more convincing is the evidence for believing that the world is prefabricated to the end of life, that the design is built into the laws of nature, the less credible becomes the special creationist worldview.4

Discovery Institute Fellow Michael Denton, Nature's Destiny

This is a very reasonable expectation, and one that is supported by all evidence. I disagree with his notion of a "designer", but this is something you would also expect from an omnipotent Creator.

The basic idea is that he started everything and then put a wind-up toy on the floor to go wherever it wanted. This is not what the Bible tells us.

It's not what theistic evolution says, either. You've confused theistic evolution with deism, which is something entirely different. Theism supposes a God Who remains entirely involved in creation.
 
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returnn23

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• The Church “proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.”


• “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”


• Quoting our late Holy Father John Paul II: “The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality, which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator.”

"Christoph Cardinal Schönborn is archbishop of Vienna and general editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church."
 
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The Barbarian

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"Christoph Cardinal Schönborn is archbishop of Vienna and general editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church."

Schönborn has since clarified that he is not objecting to the Church's acknowledgement that evolution of man is "virtually certain."
(Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Bendict XIV, in the report of The International Theological Commission)

The Church itself remains neutral in the discussion; you are free to be an IDer or even a creationist, as well as to accept evolution as a process used by God.
 
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returnn23

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Communion and Stewardship.

"64. Pope John Paul II stated some years ago that “new knowledge leads to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge”(“Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Evolution”1996). In continuity with previous twentieth century papal teaching on evolution (especially Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis ), the Holy Father’s message acknowledges that there are “several theories of evolution” that are “materialist, reductionist and spiritualist” and thus incompatible with the Catholic faith. It follows that the message of Pope John Paul II cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe. Mainly concerned with evolution as it “involves the question of man,” however, Pope John Paul’s message is specifically critical of materialistic theories of human origins and insists on the relevance of philosophy and theology for an adequate understanding of the “ontological leap” to the human which cannot be explained in purely scientific terms. The Church’s interest in evolution thus focuses particularly on “the conception of man” who, as created in the image of God, “cannot be subordinated as a pure means or instrument either to the species or to society.” As a person created in the image of God, he is capable of forming relationships of communion with other persons and with the triune God, as well as of exercising sovereignty and stewardship in the created universe. The implication of these remarks is that theories of evolution and of the origin of the universe possess particular theological interest when they touch on the doctrines of the creation ex nihilo and the creation of man in the image of God."

"As the text developed, it was discussed at numerous meetings of the subcommission and several plenary sessions of the International Theological Commission held at Rome during the period 2000-2002. The present text was approved in forma specifica, by the written ballots of the International Theological Commission. It was then submitted to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the President of the Commission, who has give his permission for its publication."


I would like to emphasize this part: 'Mainly concerned with evolution as it “involves the question of man,” however, Pope John Paul’s message is specifically critical of materialistic theories of human origins and insists on the relevance of philosophy and theology for an adequate understanding of the “ontological leap” to the human which cannot be explained in purely scientific terms.'
 
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